The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran

PROLOGUE

ALI HASHEMI only half listened to the radio after lunch on February 11, 1979. He knew that however the fighting came out in Tehran, he would feel better if he could plant something in his garden. In other parts of Iran a man like Ali, who was wealthy, in his late thirties, and a learned mullah, would never be seen, even by his family, bent over a plot of seedlings with a spade. But in Qom it was different; in the ancient families of the town, especially in the ancient families of sayyeds, or descendants of Mohammed, the men, regardless of their callings or wealth, took pride in at least occasionally working the land with their own hands. Besides, there seemed to be no point in listening to the radio carefully. After briefly reporting on the two o’clock news that the central police station was on fire, the army had withdrawn to barracks after heavy fighting during the morning, and a crowd of revolutionaries was moving up Kakh Avenue to seize the office of the Shah’s prime minister, the radio dissolved for about two and a half hours into musical selections, none of them introduced or identified. Then suddenly it was silent for three or four minutes.

Ali had put down his portable radio on one of the brick paths in the courtyard garden where he was working. When it became silent he stuck his spade in the earth, stood up, and listened. He noticed that Hamid, who came at this season to prune the trees in the gardens of the house, had stopped sawing. Ali’s older brother, who had been reading an accounting ledger in a room that opened onto the courtyard, walked up to the radio and stared at it. Ali decided to walk closer too, and at this point Hamid let himself down from the lower branches of the pine tree he had been pruning and, still carrying his saw, approached the brothers very slowly, almost tiptoeing, as if he expected the radio to explode.

Suddenly Ali heard the words of a deep-voiced man, undoubtedly a mullah from his intonation and his pronunciation of Persian words of Arabic origin. The mullah, a little breathless but dignified nonetheless, said: This is the true voice of the Iranian nation. The ill-omened regime of the Pahlavis is finished, and an Islamic government has been established under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. At this point the speaker, obviously at a loss for what to say next, cleared his throat and hemmed a few times, then said abruptly: We ask the Imam to send instructions to the radio station. Then there was a burst of whispering. Finally he announced excitedly: We hope to receive messages from Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Taleqani. Please keep listening; they will be broadcast as soon as possible.

The telephone rang. Ali turned off the radio while his brother ran to answer the phone in a nearby room. A few seconds later he reappeared, calling to Ali: My God, the head of the Manzariyeh army base has just come into town and surrendered to Ayatollah Montazeri. In a minute people will be pouring into the streets. I’m going down to check the warehouse.

Ali wanted to go as soon as possible to the shrine and the Faiziyeh, the theological college where he had taught until it had been closed by the government in 1975; he wanted to see the faces of his students, and he knew they would have questions for him. He asked Hamid to water the planted seedlings and to put the unplanted ones in the shade; then, since he was going out into the streets, he grabbed his mullah turban and put on his long black aba.

For the rest of that day Ali’s greatest problem was to walk in a dignified manner. He would start to skip, to jump, to run, then stop himself. He was almost airborne, like the fast-moving winter clouds that flew high over Qom, and his responsibility to his students and his fellow mullahs only barely managed to keep him on the ground. His fellow Qomis, usually divided in their feelings toward mullahs, Shiah men of religion (mullahs ran the theological colleges, the town’s biggest industry, but they also imported some of the town’s biggest nuisances—their students), on this day were showering every passing mullah with compliments. On the way to the shrine people shouted at Ali, Through your blessing we are saved. As he went past them they called out a variation on a standard Persian farewell, May God never let the shadows of the mullahs grow less for us. The throngs of people, in their excitement to speak to—and often embrace—their fellow Qomis, even those they hardly knew, were moving so slowly that Ali had to hide his impatience.

As he approached the larger streets near the shrine and the madresehs, the theological colleges, he sensed the relief of the town, its consciousness of release. Since January 1978, when several theological students had been killed in a demonstration over an article denouncing Ayatollah Khomeini, the bazaar of Qom, in a show of sympathy with the protesters, had been shut for all except a scattered forty days. For nearly fourteen months only the bakers, butchers, and men who sold produce off barrows in the streets had operated on a normal schedule. Qomis had been dependent on the distribution of food and clothing through local mosques, and the town had been filled with a certain sense of duress.

Today the sense of release was total. On the previous day the Qomis themselves had occupied the headquarters of SAVAK, the secret police, and the chief of the municipal police had gone to Ayatollah Montazeri, the representative and former student of Khomeini, to say that he would obey Montazeri’s orders. Even the signs of the fourteen months of duress spoke the language of victory. As Ali passed the cavelike bombed-out building that until a year ago had housed the Qom branch of the shah’s Resurrection party, he remembered the passage in the Koran that described the Prophet Mohammed’s words of comfort to a companion when the two of them were hidden in a cave, hunted by enemies determined to kill them: He said to his companion: ‘Have no fear, for God is with us’; then God sent down upon him His divine tranquillity, and strengthened him with his hosts which you did not see, and humbled to the depths the word of the unbelievers. But the word of God is exalted to the heights; for God is all-powerful, all-seeing.

In fact, everywhere the word of God seemed exalted to the heights. The very words of the posters on the buildings he passed, words that by their anger showed how vulnerable the opposition had felt throughout the struggle against the government, now looked like triumphant proclamations: Those who follow the slain Imam Hosain will gain victory over the tyrant Yazid who slew him; and The blood of martyrs has prevailed over the sword.

Ali reached the crossroads, about two hundred meters from the shrine, where a police station stood, not far from two hospitals. Even though Ali had heard that Ayatollah Montazeri had sent his representatives to supervise the police, he wasn’t prepared for what he saw now: a knot of policemen in their nattiest dark-blue uniforms, with military-style caps, bowing slightly to a middle-aged mullah, who looked at them with cautious approval as he stood outside the police station.

It was then that Ali felt he could dare to believe it had really happened. How many times had he seen the police bowing in the same way to a bureaucrat, Engineer so-and-so, just down from Tehran in his spanking new European suit, getting out of his spanking new car for a day’s business in Qom under police escort. But the police bowing to an ordinary mullah in his turban and robe?

It was like the departure of the Shah one month earlier; nobody had believed it could happen, and even if they had seen it on television, deep down nobody fully believed that it had happened. The disappearance of even the caretaker regime left by the Shah had been like the final collapse of Solomon, who had been obeyed after his death as long as his body stood. Solomon—according to the Koran—had set the genies, the occult spirits of the world, to work for him; and after his death they worked on, still believing he was alive: Thus, when We decreed death for [Solomon], nothing gave any sign of his death to them; yet a small worm of the earth was gnawing at his staff. So when [finally] he fell, the genies saw plainly that if they had known the unseen, they would not have tarried in the humiliating torment [of their subjugation]. In front of the police station Ali suddenly knew that for weeks, maybe even months, while he (and so many others) had feared the stroke of Solomon’s cane, the cane was rotting and Solomon was already dead. But of course the Shah’s dead regime could not be compared even to the dead body of a prophet such as Solomon; if it were comparable to anything mentioned in the Koran, it would be the body of Pharaoh, the enemy of God’s prophet Moses.

As Ali approached the area near the shrine he saw that the floodlights illuminating its golden dome and other prominent features had been turned on as usual before sunset. But that was almost the only thing that was usual about what he saw and heard in the next few minutes. Students training to be mullahs, who usually labored so hard to seem dignified, were actually jumping in the air and waving their hands almost as if they were dancing, an activity so repugnant to mullahs and their students that the students would have fled in terror if their teachers had suggested the possible resemblance.

Neither Ali nor any other mullah teacher had any desire to spoil the joy of their students. They felt that an age of Iranian history, the age of worldly Engineers in their European suits, had been rolled up and a new age was theirs to unroll. Some of the students were shouting such slogans as In the springtime of freedom we deeply miss our martyrs. But the noise they made was overwhelmed by the loudspeaker system of the shrine, which was—surely for the first time in history—merely broadcasting what came over the radio from Tehran. Message after message of local support by police brigades and army units, from such towns as Beidokht and Andimeshk, which Ali could place only vaguely on the map, were broadcast, together with new slogans for listeners to chant.

Some of Ali’s students began to approach him, each bowing slightly and waiting to ask a question. Haji Agha, Khomeini has made Islam live again. You studied with him in Iraq; what sort of teacher is he?

Questions of this sort were comparatively easy to deal with or to postpone for less public discussion. So were the questions from certain naïve students (not great favorites of Ali) who were preoccupied with temptations to moral corruption: "How long will it take to remove all the filth put in people’s heads by magazines like Today’s Woman?" and the like. But the difficult questions were the ones he himself was undecided about after months of thinking. One student, practically in tears with emotion, said, Haji Agha, do you think that if we bring the Koran to the people, if we fill them with the spirit of Hosain and tell the young people the true history of Islam in their schoolbooks, we can bring about the ‘return’ very soon after our beloved revolution? Ali told him, Removing Pharaoh was only the first step; we may have to wander for a time until God’s promise is fulfilled.

Ali, of course, like most mullahs in Qom, had read the book his student was referring to, The Return to Ourselves by Ali Shariati and, like most mullahs, he had longed for the masses to accept the book’s message—that with a return to true Shiah Islam, Iran would be free from the shackles of political and psychological subjugation to the West. But he knew that the Qom of his early youth, a small town of walled gardens where a tradition of learning was maintained by his mullah father and his father’s friends in a spirit of quiet heroism, had already disappeared and could never return. He rejoiced to see the two black flags of mourning for the martyrs of the revolution removed from the two minarets and a green banner tied to the top of the golden dome to signal the victory of Islam. But as he knew for certain the past could not return, he felt surprisingly uneasy about what this banner might mean for the future and, more especially, for him, for his responsibility as a learned mullah and as a descendant of the Prophet, a man entitled to wear the Prophet’s color green.

Eventually the crowd became so thick that, as one says in Persian, a dog wouldn’t recognize its master, and Ali felt that he was not doing his students or fellow townsmen any good by participating in the crush. Besides, he felt hungry; he had forgotten lunch because he had worked so hard at distracting himself from the radio with gardening.

As he reentered the inner garden courtyard at home he could still hear shouting in the large avenue two blocks away and the indistinct words of someone preaching on the loud-speaker system in the great mosque that sat a kilometer away, face-to-face with the shrine. There was a smell of rain in the air, always welcome in the dry climate of Qom.

His brother had come back and was laughing with an excitement that seemed almost as strange for an important textile merchant of the bazaar as dancing seemed for the student mullahs. All the desert between Qom and Tehran will be covered with crops by this summer. Just imagine it! It’s going to be a terrific year for business. I’d better go out and pay some calls on some friends.

The sun had not yet set but was low enough so that the shadow of one wall of the courtyard had covered all except a thin strip of the garden. Ali noticed that the shadow was reaching out to touch the spade he had stuck in the ground next to the seedlings, and he went over and picked it up. Then he noticed the gardener Hamid, standing in the shaded part of the courtyard just under the tree he had finished pruning. Hamid was holding the saw in his hand and dividing his attention between Ali and the tree. Not the least remarkable thing about the day was that Hamid had apparently continued pruning throughout the vast celebration of the late afternoon. Hamid finally decided to give Ali his entire attention.

God be blessed, sir, Islam is victorious. Of course, I’m sure ten years from now I’ll still have this saw in my hand. But it’s a great day, sir, a blessed day. You have studied with Khomeini, and you are a respected teacher in the Faiziyeh. I expect they’ll need you in Tehran. With all due respect, sir, you and I are too old to become Tehranis. You and your family have been working the soil of Qom for generations, sir; you’ll always be happiest when you return to Qom. I hope you have a chance to finish planting the seedlings soon; they won’t survive long in that flat.

CHAPTER ONE

THREE THINGS had inclined Ali Hashemi to become a mullah: his father was a mullah, Ali was clever at religious studies, and he was born and raised in Qom. For thousands of students who arrive there each year, Qom is the highest seat of religious learning in Iran. For the tens of thousands of pilgrims who come in all seasons it is a town dominated by the great religious shrine that lies at its center. Ali Hashemi, who in 1979, in the year of the Revolution, became thirty-six, studied at Qom and has always revered the shrine. But for him Qom has always been something simpler and bigger: it was the first place he knew and almost all he would know until he was nineteen.

Ali did, of course, visit other places as a child. He remembers, for example, that when he was six he made the two-hour car trip north from Qom to Tehran for the first time. But except for a vague impression that the capital city was far bigger and noisier than Qom, the one scene he clearly remembers from this visit could easily have taken place at home. He recalls sharing his father’s pleasure when they caught sight of his father’s friend, a venerable mullah, seated in a chair near some cypress trees in a hospital garden.

Ali has a far earlier memory. The trees in his very first memory are the small fruit trees that are grown with such solicitous care in the difficult soil and hot climate of Qom. Ali, who was then about three, was at one of the smaller shrines, one called in Persian the Gate of Paradise, with his mother. It was afternoon. A flock of green finches had landed on the trees of the orchard that surrounded the small brick building of the shrine. Ali remembers that a woman bent with age was bringing a pitcher of water and people were saying, The birds are pilgrims too.

There can be no doubt of the season of his next memory because he can still see in the background the red and white flowers that grow on pomegranate trees, flowers whose fragrance in spring somehow resembles the taste of the fruit that is picked in the fall. He and his brother were being led to a corner of the garden behind his father’s house, where his mother sat in front of a short leafy bush and held a newborn baby in her arms. He suddenly understood something he had been told on other occasions. He, his older brother, his father, and his newly born brother were all wearing green sashes; and Ali knew that they were all sayyeds, descendants of the Prophet. It didn’t matter that the baby kept its eyes shut; Ali liked his younger brother and felt sure his younger brother liked him.

• • •

Perhaps it is an accident that the Prophet’s color, green, is the same as the color of vegetation, but in the painfully cultivated oasis of Qom it seems altogether appropriate. Just as Mediterranean Christians have for centuries marveled that their bare hillsides can produce bloodred grapes for use as a sacrament, Iranians have for centuries loved the enclosed green gardens that their labor has won from the dry soil of their country. The ancient world knew that Iranians loved such walled-in green spaces, and the Greeks adopted the word paradeisos, borrowed from pairidaeza, an ancient Persian term for an enclosed garden. The authors of the Greek New Testament adopted the same word for the abode of the blessed. How fitting that green should be the color of the descendants of Mohammed, who, through the Koran, brought true Muslims the promise of a heavenly garden underneath which rivers flow.

From its foundation the history of Qom has revolved around attentive concern for gardens and respectful care for people such as Ali who are descendants of Mohammed. When the Muslim Arabs conquered Iran in the seventh century, they seem to have found no important town on or near the present site of Qom, only scattered villages along an unpredictable and often brackish river. It was the new beliefs and new power of the Arabs that would eventually create the wealth that made a substantial town possible.

At first, however, the Arab conquerors were too few to govern their vast empire. In the Qom valley, as in many other communities in western and central Iran, as long as the local landlords forwarded taxes to the barrack towns of the Muslim Arabs in southern Iraq, the region was left to govern itself. But it was not as easy for the Arabs of southern Iraq to find a modus vivendi with their fellow Arabs of neighboring Syria. Through the quarrel between these two groups of Muslim Arabs, reverence for the descendants of Mohammed found a permanent emotional home in southern Iraq, and, indirectly, the quarrel was the cause of the foundation of Qom.

The quarrel had begun just about the time when Iraq became the capital of the Arab Muslim empire. Twenty-four years after Mohammed’s death, Ali, his son-in-law and first cousin, had moved the capital there. The Arabs of southern Iraq had conquered most of Iran in the preceding generation, and they felt their pride of place was justified when this new leader of the Muslims moved the center of government from the holy cities of Arabia to the barrack towns of Iraq. But the Syrian Arabs disputed Ali’s leadership, and when Ali was assassinated a few years later, the Iraqis grudgingly acquiesced to the transfer of the capital to Syria. In their hearts, however, many Iraqis continued to mourn for Ali and the time of his rule, and eventually they became known as the partisans of Ali, shiah Ali, or simply the Shiah.

With the death of Ali these Iraqi Arabs transferred their allegiance to Ali’s sons, the only grandchildren of Mohammed and the ancestors of all the sayyeds now alive, including Ayatollah Khomeini, King Hassan of Morocco, King Hussein of Jordan, and Ali Hashemi. After a generation of Syrian rule, one of these grandsons, Hosain, was encouraged by the partisans of his family to challenge the Syrians and raise the banner of revolt in southern Iraq. Hosain advanced from Arabia to southern Iraq, where the partisans of Ali might be expected to help him; but few of them did. In the deserts of that province Hosain, surrounded by troops loyal to the Syrians, watched some of his family and followers die of thirst, fought a series of desperate engagements, and was killed.

The Iraqi partisans of Ali grieved bitterly that Ali’s son and the last surviving grandson of the Prophet should be killed in such misery and that they themselves should have done so little to save him. The death of Hosain became for the Shiah a focus of religious emotion comparable to the passion of Jesus in Christianity. The drama of his martyrdom is still reenacted yearly in processions and passion plays in Shiah communities from Lebanon to the Malabar coast of southern India. If many Iraqi Shiah of the seventh century grieved and plotted further rebellions, some few left and took refuge in the Qom valley of Iran.

To men from the burning heat of Arabian deserts the parched valley of the Qom River did not seem forbidding. Besides, the dryness and comparative insignificance of the Qom valley kept away more important administrators obedient to the Syrians. But these Iraqi Arabs were far from retiring in their treatment of the Zoroastrian Iranians then living in the Qom region. From central Asia to Provence the Arabs of Islam’s first century were feared for their military virtues. At first the Iranian landlords helped the Arabs settle in the valley, but the landlords soon found that they were unable to prevent them from seizing water rights and even the land itself. The Arabs, however, gave something in return: their concentration of military and economic power allowed them to extend irrigation, grow cash crops, and thereby establish the town of Qom, the first sizable settlement in the region. Gradually most Iranians accepted not only the economic but also the spiritual domination of the Arabs and became Muslims. Again there was exchange: the Arabs, while preserving their genealogies, gave up their native language and became speakers of Persian like the people around them.

At the beginning of the ninth century the great-great-great-grandson of Hosain, who was recognized by most of the Shiah as their leader, died in eastern Iran in a place that was subsequently called Mashhad in his honor—literally, the martyr’s tomb. At about the same time his sister Fatemeh died in Qom. Ordinarily the tomb of a sister of even the most important descendants of Hosain would have been a place of only local pilgrimage. But as the people of Qom were Shiah, they treasured their shrine and treated Shiah visitors to the shrine with respect; and the town gradually expanded from the Arab settlement toward the shrine.

• • •

As a small child Ali was usually pleased when the visit of a relative or a friend of the family provided an excuse for a visit to the shrine because its inner room was always redolent of the fragrance of the huge sandalwood box that enclosed Fatemeh’s tomb. He would walk with his mother near the river, past the religious colleges and the Great Mosque, to the imposing gateway through the high wall of the shrine. Inside the gate was a vast courtyard, in the center of which was a large round pool of clear greenish water, full at all seasons, unlike the Qom river, which seemed to live in states of feast or famine.

Once inside the courtyard, Ali’s mother would slow down. Ali was glad not to have to rush across the courtyard, which was paved with large cobblestones and many gravestones, all aligned to face toward the central building of the shrine. Occasionally a rowzeh-khan, a preacher and teller of edifying stories, would approach Ali’s mother. She was indistinguishable from all other women in the courtyard because all wore the chador, the black smocklike outer garment that covered them entirely except for a part of their faces. But as his mother was a native of Qom and the wife of a mullah, she did not want to pay a fee like a tourist to have the rowzeh-khan lead her in prayer.

Ali was less interested in the enormous gold dome and the four flanking minarets of the central building than he was in the intricate pattern made by the pieces of mirror cut to fit the honeycombed surface inside the three great arches on the front of the building. Just as interesting was the very thin and very ancient candle seller, with his perpetual ten-day growth of white beard, who stood in his skullcap, grayish collarless shirt, wrinkled brown jacket, and baggy gray trousers just inside the entrance to the central building. After Ali and his mother had bought a few candles and handed their shoes to another old man for safekeeping, they came to a door that divided the world of sunlight from a darker interior. His mother would say, Hold onto my chador, and together they would kiss the doorposts.

Immediately the leisurely pace of the courtyard ceased. As they walked through an anteroom they could hear the sound of weeping and praying from the next room, which was built around the tomb. At the door of the tomb chamber they would kiss the right-hand doorpost and, if the rush of exiting pilgrims did not prevent them, the left-hand doorpost as well. Once inside the tomb chamber his mother bowed toward the sarcophagus, then lit her candles from candles already burning in a special room to the side.

Sometimes the crowd of pilgrims made it hard to catch a glimpse of the tomb itself through the high and massive silver grating around the sarcophagus, but Ali could always smell the sandalwood of the coffin-shaped box that covered the tomb. The determined pace set by the pilgrims at the door of the antechamber grew faster as they joined the outer circles of pilgrims moving counterclockwise around the tomb, and the inner circles whirled so rapidly that some people seemed trapped near the grating by the press and the speed of the movement. The noise was most intense nearest the grating; some cried, O holy sinless one, others threw coins through the grating and tried to kiss it in passing, and many wept.

Often Ali’s mother would stay in the outer circle because she had not made a vow and had no reason to get close to the tomb, but she too almost invariably wept. Ali wanted to weep as well and felt it was strange that he could not weep easily, but usually after circling the tomb a few times his throat became choked and he began to cry. Eventually they pulled away from the crowd, backed out of the room facing the sarcophagus, and kissed the doorposts as they came to them. When they had recovered their shoes and gone outside Ali was always pleased to see new pilgrims strolling across the courtyard under a sky that had hardly changed since they had left it. He always felt it would be a better outing if he convinced his mother to walk home a different way. And if she was not in a hurry she would say, You little devil, and indulge him.

• • •

To secularized Iranian intellectuals Qom is something very alien and very familiar. It is familiar because as children they were taken there by grandmothers and pious aunts to visit the shrine and, in many cases, to visit family burial places. It is familiar because at home the same grandmothers and pious aunts would pay rowzeh-khans, just like those who approach pilgrims at Qom, to visit the family home and deliver a sermon that was really a lament, for his talk would be quickly drawn to the sufferings of Hosain, and the rowzeh-khan would dwell on such suffering while his entirely female audience would weep without restraint. It is familiar because the secularized intellectuals had seen turbaned mullahs like those around the shrines and seminaries of Qom at weddings, had listened to them preach at funerals, and had probably even had them as teachers in courses of religious instruction at state schools.

Yet Qom is alien as only something familiar but unacceptable can be. It is not only that Qom is a tourist trap, complete with photographers who take pictures of you and your wife with your heads poking through a painted backdrop that shows you both in dress of the most traditional piety. It is also a tourist trap in which piety is used to milk you at all levels, from the rowzeh-khans to the beggars. The latter, knowing the high religious merit of giving alms, pop up near the graves of your ancestors crying pious phrases at you and sticking out their hands. In the view of the secularized intellectual Qom not only milks the living, in the persons of over a million pilgrims a year, it also milks the estates of the deceased, for, in spite of the rising cost of burial at Qom, thousands of cadavers arrive each year from all over Iran to join the hundreds of thousands already buried there. Since it contains the tombs of so many of the privileged, even many rulers of the Shiah dynasties of Iran, one might expect parts of graveyard Qom to be well kept up, but, in fact, outside the shrine much of graveyard Qom is a shambling ruin. The fields of graves, set close together in the ground facing in the same direction, are littered with cracked fragments of the stone and brick grave markers. The mausoleums more often than not have lost their roofs and become nesting places for storks (called by Iranians Haji Lak-lak—"the pilgrim who cries lak-lak").

To the secularized intellectual it seems altogether appropriate that traditional Shiah learning should have taken as its home a vast necropolis. To him the six thousand or so students are devoted to a form of learning as antiquated as the mullah clothes they wear, a learning as arid as the climate of Qom itself. For Qom is dry even by the standards of Iranian towns, and outsiders usually have been less struck by the success of the Qomis in creating green and fertile islands than they have by the ocean of dust and desert that surround these islands. A contemporary poet, Naderpour, sees Qom as:

Many thousand women

Many thousand men

Women, scarves on their heads

Men, cloaks on their shoulders

A golden dome

With old storks

An unpleasant garden

With a few isolated trees

Empty of laughter

Silent of speech

With a half-filled pool

With green water

Many old crows

On piles of stone

Crowds of beggars

At every step in the road

White turbans

Black faces.

• • •

It never occurred to Ali on his way home from the shrine that one could accept or reject the tombs and turbans of Qom. The tombs were facts of life like the seasons or the sun; and as for the turbans, his father wore one, and so, he hoped, would he in time. Home, nevertheless, was very different from the street, which belonged to no one (not even the municipality, to judge from the way it was maintained). Like the shrine, Ali’s home was completely enclosed in a wall; and, like the shrine, it was a world in itself. But while the shrine had several huge courtyards to introduce you to its purpose, home offered a small but precise introduction, an octagonal gatehouse, one of whose doors opened on the street. Although the gatehouse was neither street nor home, it was cooler than the street and foretold the fresher air inside.

The first door on the right inside the gatehouse led to a gatekeeper’s room, which was not used in Ali’s time. Since Ali and his brothers had decided that a dangerous snake lived in a hole in its wall, for some months they would dare each other to enter and would take turns racing in and out. In contrast, the second door on the right was a familiar friend. It led to a stable that in his father’s youth had housed the kind of white donkey usually owned by mullahs of his father’s and grandfather’s station. The stable consisted of two stalls, and Ali sometimes followed the servant who went to fetch the firewood stored there and pretended to support the back end of the bundles of branches that the servant carried back to the house.

The rest of the doors led to the two principal sections of the house, called in Persian the andaruni, the inside, and the biruni, the outside. As a small child Ali seldom visited the biruni, which was exclusively for his father and his father’s male guests, but when he did, he was always struck by its resemblance to the inside. Not only was the house divided into two but everything inside the andaruni and biruni was divided into twos. Each of the two sections was built around a garden, and each garden was clearly divided in two. As you entered there was a right-hand side and a left-hand side, each mirroring the other: if there was a cypress planted near the end of the right-hand side, there was sure to be a cypress at the end of the left-hand side as well. There were two long rooms on each side of the biruni, and at the end were two small rooms, all of them two steps above the level of the garden. Ali came to admire his grandmother’s apparent rebellion against the rule of two; shortly after her husband’s death she had prevailed on Ali’s father to have three plaster arches built at the end of the garden in the biruni in front of the two small rooms, with openings that bore no relation to the two French doors that opened into these rooms.

The total isolation of the more public outside from the inside part of the house was one rule of division in two that no one dared violate. There was no opening, not even a window, that joined the andaruni and the biruni. Ali was surprised that his grandmother never insisted on knocking a hole through the wall to save the servant from carrying tea, food, charcoal, and whatever from the kitchens in the andaruni all the way out to the gatehouse and then in again to the kitchenless biruni.

The inside or andaruni had a right- and left-hand garden with a square pool in the center, like the biruni, and Ali knew this pool intimately. It was Ali’s ambition to see all of the goldfish in the pool at once—which might happen if they all came to the surface when he threw crumbs in a space between the water lily leaves or if they formed a school and all came to one edge of the pool together. Ali cannot remember his father fabricating any kind of story except to frighten his son from leaning over the pool. If he saw Ali put his hand in the water he would run over, pull Ali back, and in an angry and embarrassed tone say, "Vay, vay, don’t you know that the pool monster feasts on hands, you little devil?"

Occasionally there would be enough water to turn on the fountain, which was just a metal knob on a marble square slightly above water level at the center of the andaruni pool. The water would burble from a small pierced metal ball and the pool would overflow along grooves in the middle of each of its four sides into the four channels that ran the length of the garden and divided it into four parts. Ali remembers his grandmother’s great pleasure on these occasions. She would place melons to cool in one channel of the pool and direct the servant as to where and for how long to release water from the channels into the four garden plots they separated. Finally she would sit down with Ali by the side of one of the channels and they would bathe their feet in the water.

In the biruni the trees and flowers were set out neatly in pairs with a strict sense of symmetry. In the andaruni the jasmine bushes, the cypresses, and the flower beds were also in pairs or sometimes in fours, but the quince and pomegranate trees stood without matching companions, and in Ali’s view made the andaruni even more private. When he and his grandmother sat with their feet in the water, Ali would look at the tops of the cypresses bending slightly in the wind, and even the portion of sky enclosed by the buildings and wall seemed private and familiar.

Sometimes, when it was very hot and dry, Ali went with his mother, father, grandmother, and brothers to a basement room that also had a pool; but unlike the garden pool, it was very long and narrow and was lined with blue tiles. There were no windows in this basement, only narrow openings filled with a latticework of small ceramic tiles of the most intense blue, which allowed air but little light to enter. To Ali even the murmur of the thin jet of water at the center of the room seemed blue. As the family sat there without talking, only occasionally coughing and putting their hands or feet in or out of the water, Ali knew they all respected the blueness and silence as much as he did.

Hot weather was also the occasion for sleeping on the roof. Mattresses and mosquito netting were carried to the roof shortly after the last light of day, and Ali envied his elder brother, who was allowed to keep a flit-gun and a swatter inside his netting. After a little stirring the night would be remarkably silent, especially considering the large number of people sleeping on nearby roofs, all of which were about the same height. In the dry, clear air the stars were amazingly distinct, and the more Ali looked at them, the brighter they seemed. But unlike the private and familiar garden sky of the andaruni in daytime, the night sky seemed immense and disinterested, and the stars extraordinarily distant.

When they slept on the roof they usually woke with the call to prayer, but the two servants, Kazem and his wife, always woke up earlier, and Ali watched them on their accompanying roof fanning the samovar they had already lit in order to prepare tea. After his father prayed they would move into the proper sleeping rooms of the andaruni to try and sleep an hour or two longer. If Ali woke inside before the others, he would study the two semicircular stained-glass windows that were above the curtained French doors and seemed for ten minutes or so to be on fire when the morning sun struck them. At regular intervals there were yellow hexagons separated by squares or, viewed differently, by blue and green triangles that fitted together to form squares. If you followed the blue or green, each color formed a series of straps, one color disappearing under the other and reappearing at regular intervals. When he began to learn to draw the letters of the alphabet, Ali told his older brother he wanted to draw the design and then try to design something similar. His brother smiled and said such designs were craftsmen’s work.

Ali remembers that if his grandmother slept late, his mother would wake her by shuffling her feet on the carpet next to her or by coughing or clearing her throat. In fact, it was amazing how often the only protection for privacy was foot-shuffling and the clearing of throats. In particular, Ali remembers that no one approached the outhouse, which had no lock on its door, without coughing and dragging his feet to give any occupant a chance to clear his throat or cough in reply. Actually, as Ali realized when he left home, for those permitted into the andaruni everything was to some degree public, and you had privacy only insofar as you were able to feel private in your mind. In winter they would all sit around a charcoal brazier placed under a low table, which in turn would be covered by an enormous quilt. You could pull the quilt up to your neck or just keep it over your legs; you could read or talk; you could drink tea or sleep. At some time or other all these things would be done simultaneously around the brazier, and it was clear that those who read or slept considered themselves and were considered by everyone else to have the right to follow a private line of conduct different from that of the half dozen or dozen people a few feet away from them.

Very early in life Ali learned that, unlike his brothers, he needed more than privacy in company—he needed seclusion. Later he would walk to one of the small disused shrines on the outskirts of Qom, but as a child he found that when his mother and grandmother were busy, no one minded if he went under a bush and, as he very much liked to do, watched others closely from his seclusion or just tried to understand things that people had said. Once under such a bush he saw the war of the ants. He instantly knew the cause of the war and the nature of the parties. The red ants, whose bite (he had been told) was slightly poisonous, were Sunnis, the party among Muslims that rejected the claim of the descendants of Ali, and they were attacking the black ants, who were obviously Shiah, since black as well as green was a color worn by people like Ali Hashemi’s father who claimed descent from Ali. He remembers admiring the black ants for the justness of their cause and their individual heroism; but as the battle continued, he began to admire the orderliness and steadiness of the slower-moving red ants. As far as he could tell, neither side won.

Around his sixth birthday Ali stopped going to the bathhouse with his mother and started to go with his father. It wasn’t the only important change at that time in his life; learning to pray, learning to write, and learning to sit quietly with his father’s friends were just as new and took more hours each week than a visit to the bath. But somehow he remembers the change at the bathhouse best: one week he was with a lot of talkative, sweating, half-naked women, the next week he was sitting with a lot of solemn, half-naked men while his father explained to him that in this bathhouse, as in so many others in Iran, a painter had put a picture of the devil on the ceiling. He had done so because the devil was supposed to torture men in a place of fire and steam like the bathhouse. The real devil, his father added, was Satan, the enemy of God. Ali asked why God hadn’t destroyed Satan if he was God’s enemy. His father smiled, wiped his face with a towel, and said he was a very clever boy, a real little devil himself.

It wasn’t that his mother had less time for him, it was that his father seemed to have so much more. He had often watched his father pray and had tried in private to raise and lower his hands, bend forward, kneel, and touch his forehead to the ground in the same way that his father did. It was hopeless. Besides, his father spoke the prayer in Arabic, and Ali couldn’t remember more than a word or two of what his father said. Some months after he stopped going to the bath with his mother, his father noticed Ali imitating his movements while he prayed. When he finished his prayer he took Ali’s two hands in his own hands and said, God likes us to begin our prayers by saying in our heart or out loud, ‘I intend to pray.’ ‘I intend to pray’ means ‘I want to pray.’

Ali said, But I do want to pray—I want to be like you.

His father smiled and rubbed Ali’s chin. All right, I know you want to be like me. Learn part of the prayer in Arabic and you’ll be ready to do it like me when you are old enough to know what it means to say ‘I intend.’

Looking back, Ali thinks it incredible that he should have had his first taste of Arabic—the true language of revelation and religious learning—devouring whole sentences then and there in front of his father, without any fanfare or ceremonious introduction. His father’s translation of the Arabic sentences word for word from Arabic into Persian helped hardly at all, but the words of each sentence linked themselves to each other in a chain that never broke. The trouble was that sometimes Ali got the sentences themselves in the wrong order, and sometimes he developed new ways of saying Arabic words which amused his father very much. Twice in a prayer he had to repeat the shortest chapter of the Koran:

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Beneficent;

Say: He is God the One,

God the Eternal.

He does not beget and is not begotten;

And there is none like unto him.

These twenty or so words in Arabic seemed to enter Ali almost at one swallow, but when he recited them back to his father two days later, for the Arabic word samad, Eternal, he said shamad, the Persian word for mosquito netting. "Dear son, if you have to speak Persian instead of Arabic in your prayers, at least compare God to something more substantial like